Vaccines and the Politics of Austerity
By 
The EU reacted to both the recessions of 2008/9 and 2020/1 with much less stimulus than the US (despite the ARRA in particular being plainly inadequate.) The U.S. has also provided more pandemic relief than every country in the EU combined. If you get information about politics from Twitter dot com, however, you’re likely to encounter fictional acts of non-means-tested relief on made-up European oceans, from people up to and including members of Congress:
“Many nations” did not issue monthly checks to their citizens as part of Covid relief. In fact, none did. In fact, the US is the only major country that’s made large direct payments to most of its citizens as part of Covid relief. https://t.co/jXQ22DJhNx— James Surowiecki (@JamesSurowiecki) March 16, 2021
Even stranger about the idea that the EU opposes rather than embodies the illogical politics of austerity is that they guaranteed themselves a massive under-supply of COVID vaccines to save themselves a few bucks:
As Eyck Freymann and Elettra Ardissino write in Foreign Policy: “Spring in the European Union is going to be dismal.” Bild, a German newspaper, recently ran the headline “Liebe Briten, We Beneiden You!” — a mixture of German and English that means “Dear Brits, We Envy You!” Wolfgang Münchau of Eurointelligence has said that Europe’s vaccination program rivals the continent’s budget austerity of recent years as “the E.U.’s worst policy error during my lifetime.”
[…]
Europe put a big emphasis on negotiating a low price for vaccine doses. Israeli officials, by contrast, were willing to pay a premium to receive doses quickly. Israel has paid around $25 per Pfizer dose, and the U.S. pays about $20 per dose. The E.U. pays from $15 to $19.
The discounted price became another reason that Europe had to wait in line behind other countries. Even in purely economic terms, the trade-off will probably be a bad one: Each $1 saved per vaccine dose might ultimately add up to $1 billion — a rounding error in a trading bloc with a nearly $20 trillion annual economic output. A single additional lockdown, like the one Italy announced this week, could wipe out any savings.
“The price difference is macroeconomically irrelevant,” Münchau writes. The E.U. “tried to lock in a perceived short-term price advantage at the expense of everything else.”
“Europe does policy better than the US” is often a valid assumption, but in the case of COVID response people are saying it when it’s very plainly not true.